eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

October 2013

10/27/2013

I could be wrong but, I do not believe that there
was a credible moment in this entire movie. I would have to watch it again to determine
if I am a hundred percent right about that but … I don’t believe I will. One of
the characters makes the following statement:

“When a magician waves
his hand and says, ‘This is where the magic is happening.’ The real trick is
happening somewhere else. Misdirection.”

10/26/2013

It
would be easy to conclude that success or failure in life is determined by
outcomes. If you set a goal and achieved it, you are a success. If you set a
goal and did not achieve it, you are a failure. Would Hemingway agree or
disagree with this formula for determining success? How does he make his point
through the story of Santiago and the Marlin?

J.K. Rowling, author of the now famous Harry Potter
series has sold over 450 million books. Thus, the Harry Potter series she
created has become the best-selling book series in history. The movies that
were based on these books have similarly become the highest grossing movie
series in history. When she came up with the idea for the Potter series on a delayed
train in 1990, she was living in poverty. By 2008, she had amassed over 700
million dollars. She has won dozens of the most prestigious literary awards and
numerous honorary doctorates. One would think that J.K. Rowling would know
something of success. Here is what she says about it,

“It is impossible to live without
failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not
have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

I suspect that Earnest
Hemingway would agree. The central character of his novel, The Old Man and the Sea says as much when he asks himself about his
failure to bring his prize marlin back to port:

“And
what beat you, he [Santiago] thought.
‘Nothing,’ he said aloud, ‘I went out too far’“

Clearly, success is not
always determined by the outcome of a given venture. Despite his failure to
bring back the fish he set out to catch, Santiago succeeds on many levels. One
simply has to look beyond the shark-ravaged bones of the marlin to see what
these successes are.

First, Santiago returns
to the village with all the evidence he needs to prove to the boy (his primary
source of confidence during the bleak period of bad luck that precedes his
battle with the great fish) that such confidence was not misplaced. The boy
believes in him when he sets out and, upon seeing the fish that “got away” when
Santiago returns, his faith is confirmed. One might argue that if there are
people who believe in you when you die, you have succeeded somehow.

Just as Santiago’s faith
in Joe DiMaggio is not shaken by an off-season, Hemingway is arguing indirectly
that a reader’s faith should not be shaken by an “off-novel.” The boy’s faith,
like the faith of the disciples of Jesus, cannot be obscured by some momentary
set-back. Hemingway’s periodic references to Jesus are not accidental. Like Jesus,
Santiago suffered defeat but not failure. In the end, Santiago’s reputation as
the greatest fisherman his village had ever seen was confirmed by the size of
the skeleton that they find strapped to the side of the boat. Sharks cannot
destroy the evidence of Santiago’s talent, just as critics could not destroy
the talented essence of a writer like Hemingway.

We might also add that
Santiago’s great success cannot be measured by the weight of fish flesh brought
to market when the real victory is found in his ability to overcome himself in
the process of his quest. Most of Old Man
and the Sea is a narrative of an old man wrestling with himself, not with a
fish. Among the many internal obstacles that Santiago must overcome to land
this fish, the following come immediately to mind. He must overcome the
inclination to believe what the village believes about him (he is unlucky). He
must overcome the desire to retire to an enjoyment of earlier successes (the
arm-wrestling contest). He must choose to go out and “prove himself” again when
it would be easier to simply to relive memories of “glory days.” Santiago has
to combat loneliness. He wishes the boy were there but instead of heading home,
he talks to himself. Santiago must overcome wounds and cramps and weariness and
hunger. It is this ability to overcome pain, he says, that makes him superior
to the marlin. Santiago succeeds in breaking through each and every one of the
internal distractions that his “inner wimp” offers up to get him to quit. This,
to Hemingway, is what winners do, even if they lose the fight in the end.

Lastly, we can see Hemingway’s view of success clearly
illustrated in Santiago’s analysis of his own failure. Several times in the
story, we read of Santiago’s intention to go out as far as he can. Santiago is
a success because he does not aim so low that he knows he can succeed. He takes
risks. A man can fail many times,” John
Burroughs writes, “but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody
else.” Santiago accepts fate only when that fate is inevitable but still he
fights the sharks off until he has nothing but his own teeth to fight them
with. Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even
though checkered by failure,” Theodore Roosevelt once insisted to an audience,

“than to rank with those poor spirits
who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that
knows not victory nor defeat.”

For Hemingway, success involves looking back at
a life well fought. It involves looking back without regret and saying, “I did
my best to accomplish something I could not have known was beyond me until I
tried.” One is reminded of a story that former President, Jimmy Carter told in
his autobiography Why Not Your Best?

“The
title comes from a question Admiral Rickover asked him during a job interview,
following his graduation from the Naval Academy. "Did you do your
best?" Rickover asked. Carter initially answered "yes sir" but
after some thought said, "no sir, I didn't always do my best."
Describing the scene years later, Carter writes, "He asked one final
question which I have never been able to forget-or to answer. He said,
"Why not?"

http://estore.archives.gov/Carter/ProductInfo/C1011.aspx

Carter would lose his bid for re-election to
Ronald Reagan by a huge landslide. His defeat was one of the greatest failures
of American electoral history. But Carter went on to serve the global
community in multiple capacities. He has been a key spokesperson for Habitat
for Humanity, an organization that builds homes for poor people and he is the
only President to receive a Nobel Prize for humanitarian work done after being President.

10/20/2013

James
Madison and the Making of America is a tour d’force
demonstrating just how significant the life of one man can be. In a sense, the
life of James Madison is the life of America as a country in its infancy. If we
compare American government to baseball, James Madison would be the inventor of
baseball, the first member inducted into the Hall of Fame, the first umpire,
the first manager of a World Series team, the first Major League Baseball Commissioner,
the first author of an official rulebook, and the first play by play radio commentator.

James
Madison helped to win the Revolution. He helped write Virginia’s constitution. He
then brought the Virginia plan to the constitutional convention inn Philadelphia,
took its minutes, argued its compromises to resolution, defended it in the
ratification conventions, opposed the Federalist “mishandling” of it, executed
its policies under Jefferson, applied it during his own administration, and
advised his heir apparent, James Monroe in furthering its aims. One might
almost think of America as Madisonville.

Kevin
Kutzman’s book goes into meticulous detail during each and every one of these
phases and by the time we are done, we realize that to learn the American constitution
is to learn James Madison and to study the life of James Madison is to study American
government.

Madison’s
interest in the Revolution that had begun in Massachusetts was inevitable in
some ways. If parliament could close the port of Boston and reorganize its
government into a military dictatorship, it could do the same to any colony. If
it could do it to John Adams’ “country” of Massachusetts, it could do it to his
“country” of Virginia. He worked tirelessly to fund the armies that were needed
to win the Revolution and he was intimately familiar with the problems created
by having a government that had not the power to execute its own will in that
regard. His intentions upon arrival in Philadelphia were clear and
demonstratively necessary. He was, you might say, the “original Federalist”
(though he would later part company with those who took that name for party
purposes). Madison prepared for the Virginia constitutional convention and the
Federal constitutional convention by studying all the other colony’s constitutions
and indeed all the constitutions in the world that he could lay hands on. He
was always the most prepared person in the room and though Madison was a junior
member in the Virginia assembly, he was a gravitational force to be reckoned
with.

At the Virginia
convention, Madison would have acquiesced in the first attempt to exclude
people from the definition of the word “man.”

"Nicholas proposed making a change
to the Virginia Constitution … “All men are by nature equally free and
independent and have certain inherent rights of which … when they enter into a state of society … they cannot by any
compact deprive or divest their posterity.”

Effectively,
they asserted that slaves were not part of political society.

It is this
notion that Chief Justice Roger Taney would assert in the Dred Scott case
decades later. When the Declaration refers to “all men being equal,” it is referring
only to “all men who were part of the club when it was founded.”

The only
time Madison lost an election, Gutzman notes, it was as a consequence of his
not providing the voters with Whiskey. “Vote for me and I will take the office,” he
said, and so they did not elect them,” Gutzman writes. Voters expected to be
offered libations by their candidates and Madison was ultimately too principled
to do it. There is much to be learned about modern politics here and it is not
hard to see why he would be suspicious of too much “democracy.” Madison was
single minded (something I rather like about him). “A gloomy stiff creature. …
The most unsociable creature in existence” one Congressman’s wife said (my kind
of guy). “He has rather too much theory,” Representative Fischer Aimes said of
Madison once. “His language is very proper. I think him too much of a book
politician. … he displays little warmth of heart …”

It is hard
to read as much he did and keep your heart warm I suppose. Ultimately, he had
Dolly to do much of his feeling for him.

At the
heart of Madison’s vision for America was a central government that could do
and would do what individual States could not or would not do. And at the heart
of that vision was sufficient empowerment to carry out that task fairly and
expeditiously. America under the Articles of Confederation had no means to
threaten and could accomplish nothing. Spain wanted to retard America’s growth
by depriving us of use of the Mississippi. We could do nothing. Daniel Shays
wanted to shut down the courts of his state to stop banks from foreclosing (an
idea that might catch on elsewhere if not supressed). The Federal Congress
could do nothing. States were about to go to war with each other over
overlapping land claims. The Congress could do nothing. Foreign Countries would
not make treaties with the U.S. because states refused to keep terms of them.
The Congress could do nothing. England was violating its treaties. Congress
could do nothing. It had no arm to avenge and no blood to support that arm if
it did. Madison understood the need to
raise money. Madison began suggesting that the National government could and
should just requisition things. “The want of this article – money – is the
source of all our public difficulties and misfortunes,” he insisted (If he only
knew what our budgets looked like today!) His experience of the war led him to
believe that the Federal government had to have power to make States support
the army.

In “Vices of
the Political System of the United States” Madison outlined 12 flaws in the
Confederation. His diagnosis would lead to a country aimed primarily at curing
the ills as he described them. It would be interesting to see what vices he
would write about if he were to write a similar document today.

Gutzman’s
treatment of Madison’s role in the constitutional Convention, his role in
writing the Federalist Papers, his
role in the Virginia ratifying convention; his role in helping to form the Jeffersonian-Republican
Party in opposition to the Federalists, his role in the Jefferson Administration,
his role as President, his role as advisor to Monroe, and even his role in
working for the African Colonization Society after he stepped down from
official government work is … well … meticulous. I have pages of notes but no
time to reflect on them really. Here are just three highlights:

One: Madison argued for the
Constitution, not because it was perfect or because he thought it was the best
and most workable plan. He argued for it because he knew it to be better than
the alternative. He would not let the perfect stand in the way of the good.

Two: Madison insisted that the Constitution
as written had all the protections needed to protect the people and the States
from federal usurpations of power. He conceded to the Bill of Rights as an unnecessary
but comforting safety feature. In this optimistic view, he was, as history
would later confirm, being naïve. In the end, Patrick Henry was right (though
not entirely right). Power likes to use power to acquire more power and it
seems that Madison’s checks and balances were more vulnerable to “hackers” than
he thought possible. Perhaps the fact that the framers had been sent to Philadelphia
to revise the Articles of Confederation and took upon themselves a task much
more substantive should have given him a hint that the Legislative, Executive,
and Judiciary branches that he was helping to create would all, when given the chance, do something similar. They would all
take what they were assigned, and reinvent their jobs to give themselves more
power than delegated.

Three: Madison would accuse the opponents
of ratification and the Constitution of being disunionists. If they did not
want to give the federal government more power, he said, then they must WANT
disunion and chaos. Oddly enough, in his later political career, he would find
himself on the receiving end of these sorts of charges all the time. Every time
he opposed the Federalists at any point, he himself would be accused of being a
French radical chaos-lover.

I somehow
think that if he were here today, he would be troubled. But he would also see
just how well spent his time on the planet had been. Though we all have
suffered a little for the shortcomings of his work, we have all gained much
more than we have suffered. Three cornered hats off to you Mr. Madison. Thanks.

Question for Comment: What amendment to the
Constitution would you propose if you could?

"Right now my scientific mind is telling me to have nothing more to do with this. And yours should, too." - Knowing

Okay, if I tell you too much about this film I will spoil it
for you, so I won’t … but I can’t help but take a moment to show off a little
something. This movie is about children who can predict the future. It opens
with a little girl who puts her numerically encoded prophecy into an elementary
school time capsule that won’t be opened for another fifty years. Most of the
film takes place after her predictions resurface 50 years later. Anyway, the
thing that I thought I would mention is that the school the children attend in
the movie is the “William Dawes Elementary School” in Lexington, Ma. You see
the name in the opening scene and a bell is ringing in the background when you
do. Someone not familiar with American history might not think twice about it
but … William Dawes was the man who, with Paul Revere, shared the
responsibility of warning the militias in Lexington and Concord that redcoats
were coming; a certain poetic irony given the task of the children who go there
and play prophetic roles throughout the film.

I must say that the film would make an interesting backdrop
to the exploration of human apocalyptical musings. I know I for one was brought
up with the notion of a coming and certain apocalypse; one that would be preceded
by times of great difficulty for human-kind. Indeed, the theologians of my
denominational milieu often differentiated themselves on the basis of their
various beliefs about how it would all play out. There were pre-millenialists
and post-millenialists and
a-millenialists – those who argued that believers would go through the tribulation
and those who believed that they would not and those who believed that there
wouldn’t be one. Inevitably, the discussion turned to the prophecies of the
Hebrew seers, Daniel and Isaiah and Ezekiel, and the visions of the apostle
John in the New Testament book of Revelations. These prophecies involved
numbers and years and hidden code words and strange dreams of wheels within
wheels and valleys of dry bones and horsemen of the apocalypse and the lake of
fire and fantastic images of great fear and hope. “We were all doomed.” “We
were all to be saved.” “We were all to be doomed and then saved or saved and
then doomed.” I just remember it being a world that made it really difficult to
see yourself as just a normal kid who might navigate one’s way through life
with the same sort of pragmatic reasonableness of most kids my age.

How does one make friends with people who were or were not
worthy of deliverance from such magnificent disasters? Who might or might not believe
accurately enough to be raptured? Would I? The stakes were always so high. I
sometimes wonder if it just wore out my amygdala thinking about it all and that this
burning of all my neurotransmitters as a child is one of the reasons why I am
so flat affect today.

Clearly, whether it is next year or in a billion years,
something is going to happen in this big weenie roast of a solar system of
ours.

And so how I spend today will come out making sense or not
making sense eventually I guess.

10/19/2013

I suppose it is fair to say that every family has a story.
Not everyone has someone in it who could tell it this well. Not every family
that did would want that person to. Sarah Polley has decided to tell her story
and for that reason, she has decided to tell the stories of all the people
(still alive) who were there when it happened. To her credit, she is going to
let them tell it if they want to. Througout the film, she remains mostly
outside the camera’s gaze, asking questions – the sadistic interviewer as her
father puts it.

In the introduction, her father sets up the action by
telling us outright, that stories have to be told to be stories. “When you are
in the middle of a story,” he says,

“it isn’t a story at all. But only
a confusion - a dark roaring – a blindness. It is only afterwards that it
becomes anything like a story when you are telling it to yourself or to someone
else.”

“If the story has some resonance,” Sarah’s biological father
says towards the end, “then you don’t keep it to yourself.” This family has
decided to tell its secrets … even if they do not all agree about what they
are. And at the very end, we are reminded that we are never at the end of
telling the story of a family’s life. For all we know, what we don’t know will
amount to more than what we think we do.

“Love is so short. Forgetting is so long,” Pablo Neruda tells
us in his poem “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines.” I suppose the great
irony here is that the person perhaps least worthy of devotion in the story is
the one obviously most loved. That may always be a mystery.

Question for Comment:
Would your family want to have a documentary made of it? Do you think there
would be surprises?

10/13/2013

“Given recent advances synesthesia may be the
first perceptual condition for which a gene can be discovered. It appears that synesthetic
perception results from a heritable ove-rinteraction between different areas of
the brain.”

This book is about a
rare (but more common than it used to be suspected) brain wiring condition
known as Synesthesia. Ultimately, synesthesia is a condition, for
good or bad, that cross references various senses such that a person with this
sort of wiring can see shapes when hearing sounds or smell smells when seeing
words or see colors when hearing words or taste tastes when hearing sounds or
see colors when tasting food or feel touches when hearing sound, etc. The
boundaries between stimulus and sensation in the brain is rather pourous in the
people who have this condition and it allows them to benefit from what you
might call “sensory stereo.”

Imagine any sort of
calculator that gives you a picture when you hit the key for a number or plays
a sound when you hit the equal sign or triggers the feeling of a slippery ball
in your hand when you hit the plus key. The vast majority of synesthetes simply
see color when they read words but there are people who find multiple
connections augmenting their experience of the world. The book gives a list of
some 20-30 different combinations of sensory input-output differentials that can
be regarded as qualifying.

Interestingly, synesthetes
can see numbers in color but only as the number is attended to. That is, if you
show someone with this form a of synesthesia a page of black fives and twos,
they will not see the different numbers in color until they look at them directly. In other words, they have to note
that a five is a five and then they will note its color.

Another interesting fact
is that synethetes see more colors than "normals" or at least they
report doing so. Seeing things in color means that they see them in very
specific colors.

The authors suggest it
may possibly be that we all see the
world with overlapping multiple senses but that some people are conscious of it
and most of us or not. In other words, synesthetes may be simply normal people
who are conscious of being so.

A related illusion the
book references is called auditory
driving, a phenomenon of experience in which the apparent speed of a
flickering light seems faster or slower depending on the rate of an
accompanying sound. Simple illusions like these powerfully reveal that vision
and hearing are tightly coupled at very early levels neurologically.

“Synesthesia is not
localized in any one spot in the brain,” the book argues,

“Rather we need to think in terms of neural
networks that connect multiple brain regions because synesthesia seems to be
the perceptual result of increased crosstalk between brain areas.

How might such an increase crosstalk come about?
Is it from a failure to prune connections at an early age? Or is cross wiring
present in everyone, synesthetes and non synesthetes alike, with only
synesthetes having the pleasure of experiencing activity above the threshold
for conscious awareness?”

I wonder if any of us would want to
experience the world without the filters that make it usable to us? I suspect
that we would go pretty crazy pretty fast. If every part of the brain had to be
on duty and processing all the time, I wonder how fast we would run it out of
juice and go lights-out?

The exigencies of my
schedule these days do not allow me to review entire books anymore it seems …
but that is no reason to stop me from capturing what I can. Just as Santiago
cannot seem to bring home anything but the skeleton of his great fish in
Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, so I
will have to content myself with what I can bring back from my reading
expeditions, abbreviated as they must be.

Thus, on to Earnest
Hemingway; The authors describe him as both less and greater than the sum of
his projections of himself.

“He was the bullfight aficionado, the skier, the
big and little game hunter, the fisherman, the prizefighter and Shadowboxer,
the short time darling of the Loyalist sympathizers in the Spanish Civil War,
the bearded soldier of Fortune miraculously transported to time to ride
missions with Royal Air Force, to land in Normandy on Foxgreen beach ..."

Hemingway picks up where
the Naturalists seem to have left off. He admits that all stories end in death.
“The world breaks everyone,” he says in For
Whom the Bell Tolls, “and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
But those that will not break it kills.” His heroes, the authors assert, are
"winners who take nothing."

Here is how Hemingway
explains what “victory” looks like.

“Who the hell should care about saving his soul
when it is a man's duty to lose it intelligently, the way you would sell a
position you were defending, if you could not hold it, as expensively as
possible, trying to make it the most expensive position that was ever sold.”

You are not a hero in
the end because you outlasted all the marlin or all the bulls. No, you are a
hero because you took a few out with you before you succumbed to the
inevitable. You did not surrender. Immortality can only come from being remembered and being
remembered requires that you lived as though you could win immortality otherwise.

“No other serious writer
of Hemingway stature the 20th century,” say the authors, “commanded as large
and is responsive the leadership through all levels of society as he did.” His
stories can be read at multiple levels and so they are. They can appeal to you
if you are simply interested in fishing and bullfighting and no more and they
can appeal to you if you are interested only in philosophy. Again, just as
Santiago sets his lines at different levels of ocean depth, so Hemingway makes
his stories work for all searchers.

“The second reason for
this popularity,” the book argues,

“may will be the vicarious excitement of
physical and sensuous experience that Hemingway offered in abundance to an
audience increasingly urban oriented, increasingly desensitized and immunized from
the physical life of full sensory response. Hemingway's talent for evoking
physical sensations, or transmuting into prose how it is taste, to see, to
hear, smell, to feel in a great variety of ways is a staple ingredient of his
prose.”

Many levels. Many
senses. Maybe that is the formula. “It is because we have had such great
writers in the past, said Hemingway, “that a writer is driven far out past
where he can go, out to where no one can help him.” Every time he sat down to
write, Hemingway had top pretend that he had never written; that he would have
to prove himself today.

“Santiago, in The Old Man and the Sea, could very well be speaking for his author
as he describes his attitude in the face of the new encounter: The thousand
times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each
time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.”

Writing, for him, seemed
to have been a competitive sport. It was like fishing or hunting. One sees this
in The Old Man and the Sea when one
thinks of Santiago’s attempt to bring in a fish far bigger than his
expectations. “The success of the fiction, in part,” say Rovit and Brenner,

“will depend upon the author’s ability to lead
the reader, to hook him soundly, and when he is hooked and wriggling against
the wall, to administer the gaff accurately and well. Many critics have noticed
the tendencies of Hemingway's sporting in bullfighting descriptions to move
into areas usually connotative of the writing process.”

Hemingway, like
Santiago,” they continue,

“holds his pressure on the line until he has
exacted the maximum degree of strain; if he slackens it, the reader may get
away; if he pulls it to tight the line may break and the reader will be free.
But when it is just right, as in Big Two
Hearted River, the reader is caught and forced into response.”

In a sense, writing
involved experiencing and reflecting uncompromisingly and deeply upon that
experience. As Hemingway explains in Death
in the Afternoon:

“I was trying to write then and I found the
greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt rather than
what you were supposed to feel, was to put down what really happened in action;
what the actual things were which produced the emotions of your experience. The
real thing, the sequence of motion in fact which made the emotion which would
be as valid in a year or in 10 years or, with luck, and if you stated it purely
enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it.”

It appears that Earnest
Hemingway believed that if the experience and the response to it were captured accurately
enough; the reader could do the rest and make symbols and relevant applications
to their own life without the author’s help. The following passages speak to
that issue.

“This comment to George Plympton on symbolic
meanings in his fiction underscores the richness of that parallel: "I
suppose there are symbols since pricks critics keep finding them. If you do not
mind I dislike talking about them. It is hard enough to write books and stories
without being asked to explain them as well. Read anything I write for the
pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you
brought to the reading."

“This novella [Old Man and the Sea]is
probably Hemingway's most evocative construction, tense and clean on the
surface, but suggesting layers of meaning just out of reach in the murky levels
fathoms beneath. There can be little doubt it is meant to be a symbolic
fiction, but it would be wrong to suppose that Hemingway fixed his meanings in
the fable, expecting his readers to haul them up after him like so many
weighted lobster traps. His remark to a reporter is revealing "I tried to
make it a real old man, a real boy, a real sea with real fish and real sharks.
But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things."

Nor is this remark evasive. It points out that
there are more meanings possible in art that evade conceptualization. For as
Emerson wrote 100 years earlier: “The quality of the imaginations is to flow
and not to freeze ...”

The book concludes that
Hemingway’s successes were the result of work and practice and experience. In a
sense, you might argue that Santiago lands this fish because of all he has learned in the 85 days previous catching nothing.

“Almost all of Hemingway's significant
contemporaries possessed talents beyond his ability. Faulkner's fecundity of
imagination and invention far surpassed his. He never learned how to dramatize
and give a poetic life to the abstractions of ideas as Elliot could so
handsomely do. He lacked Thomas Wolfe's torrential self-confidence. He was
completely without the fine sense of scenario and the light touch of wit that
could bring straight exposition to life, as in F Scott Fitzgerald's work. He
did not have the dogged seriousness of vision and historical curiosity which
his friend John Dos Passos possessed. He could not tell a story with the
effortless charm that came to Steinbeck so naturally. ... In fact, he lacked
almost all the tools that fiction writers have traditionally employed as their
basic stock in trade. He had only what seems a tormented zeal to find out who
he was by writing it out himself, a measurement of personal integrity that
rarely faltered, and a genius for adapting the limited resources and materials
that he did possess into a brilliant harmonic fusion.

Like Santiago, that other fisherman who knew
many tricks, Hemingway went ‘too far out’ in every one of his serious fictions;
he extended himself beyond his resources and powers; and he fought his way home
on sheer nerve and desperate faith.”

Question for Comment: Do you try to accomplish more than you can in life? Or less? Why?